Kevin Starr received a B.A. from the University of San Francisco, an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and a Master of Library Science from U.C. Berkeley. He served as the City Librarian of San Francisco and the State Librarian of California. He was a University Professor and a Professor of History at the University of Southern California, where he served for fifteen years as a director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. Starr's many articles and books, including his Americans and the California Dream series, have earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society, the Presidential Medallion of the University of Southern California, the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the National Humanities Medal.
Continental Ambitions is the book I have been craving for years. It
is the first historical study I've ever read that explains my
America, in which Catholicism is not marginal and Hispanics are not
minor latecomers. Starr's vision is truly continental. For him, the
West is not a nineteenth century Yankee frontier but the epic
landscape that parallels (and often precedes) Puritan New England
as foundational to American identity. Continental Ambitions is not
just the history of the Catholic Church in North America but also
the untold story of the United States.
-- Dana Gioia, Former Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts and
Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture, University of
Southern California p>Continental Ambitions represents a major
contribution to a fresh perspective on the European making of the
New World. Guided by this narrative, we tread in the steps of
intrepid men and women and come to measure their convictions and
courage.
-- Judge John T. Noonan, Jr. United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit p>To see in one book the history of Catholics in
the New World, its glories and its tragedies, is almost like
reading a secret history of a lost tribe. Kevin Starr's magisterial
narration of European Catholic presence in North America-the Norse,
the Spanish, the French, the English, plus a few others-is a
contribution of the first order to our understanding of the whole
foundation of this land of the free.
-- James V. Schall, S.J. Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University
Kevin Starr's enthralling Continental Ambitions meticulously
narrates the history of Catholicism as North America's first form
of Christianity vividly present centuries before the waves of
immigration that we typically associate with the formation of the
American Catholic community.
-- Charlotte Allen, Author, The Human Christ: The Search for the
Historical Jesus p>These accounts of a human drama heroic and
villainous, saintly and sanguineous, are a feast for the historian
and, more importantly, food for our generation starved of the story
of its own past. The romantic whose knowledge is airbrushed and the
cynic whose knowledge is cobbled together with clich's will jointly
be challenged. For everyone, reading this book could be a
transforming experience, and a delight as well.
-- Fr. George Rutler , Author, He Spoke to Us: Discerning God in
People and Events p>Many Americans, Catholics among them, know
very little about the distinctive Catholic cultures that flourished
in North America long before the Pilgrims and the Puritans arrived.
Now, thankfully, we have Kevin Starr's scholarly but highly
readable Continental Ambitions to fill the knowledge gap. The story
it tells is not only fascinating in its own right but illuminating
for the light it sheds on issues that remain part of the Catholic
experience.
-- Russell Shaw, Author, Catholics in America
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